In this context there’s no reason to specify “liquid” though. You wouldn’t say “I drank from a glass of liquid tap water,” or “it was tepid so I got some water ice cubes from the freezer.”
ETA: Bad examples, given you’ve carved out exemptions for forms of water having their own names. Still, context is important. How about “the patient was supplied with supplementary gaseous oxygen to assist her breathing?”
So, if the article had stated ‘mercury’ (in a balloon, being dropped on the floor) rather than ‘liquid mercury’, you would have been seriously confused?
Post deleted. Happy now?
Actually, no. I thought it was a nice discussion. You almost had me convinced that it wasn’t a pleonasm.
If the liquid mercury gives you cancer, do you get a neoplasm?
I read the second extract and decided you didn’t like argument.
Seriously, do not try this at home.
ATSDR Toxic Substances Portal: Mercury.
Actually, I’d be somewhat curious about how solid mecury would behave. Is it brittle? Ductile? Shatter? Dent?
Depends on local conditions. On Neptune, elemental Mercury is a solid. On the planet Mercury, elemental Mercury is a gas and Iron is a liquid.
Oh Hell, on certain days around here, you could fill the balloon indoors, then leave it outside for a bit.
That was the wrong decision, based on the wrong conclusion. It was just an argument. The argument that it was about semantics, not about physics.
Depends where you are though. A Mercurian day is phase locked, I think, to the orbit and is 2/3 of an orbital period from our POV and half from theirs. I believe the temperature never gets above a little over 400C (around 700K in fact) in the equatorial summer so lead would be molten in summer but iron wouldn’t be anywhere near it. There may be regions near the poles where, if you kept walking in the opposite direction to the rotation, the temperature would be human-survivable (but the radiation would quickly kill you.)
If the planet did have surface supplies of elemental mercury, it would vaporise in summer heat at the Equator, so there would be mercury clouds which would rain liquid mercury as they reached colder areas, and freeze to mercury ice at the poles. Thus you would eventually get polar icecaps of solid mercury, since they never go warm enough to melt it. Eventually all the mercury would freeze at the poles and the clouds and rain would stop.
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